


This Is How It Started

by merrin



Series: Scenes From the Apocalypse [3]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Freeform, M/M, Pacific Rim - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 19:35:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10860654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrin/pseuds/merrin
Summary: Forward might not even be the right direction, but it’s the only direction he can go.





	This Is How It Started

This is how it started: 

The pain in his leg cancels out everything else, which almost helps him focus. Almost, but not quite. One foot in front of the other, don't think about the sucking black fuzzy dark sleep space in the rig beside him. Rain and wind sluice through the hole the kaiju had punched in Nova’s head, a waterfall over his helmet he can barely see through. 

Forward might not even be the right direction, but it’s the only direction he can go. 

Tomorrow, Jamie will find out that Nova lost most of one arm and all of the other. That when he’d finally collapsed to his knees, he was already through the doors of the dome. That Jordie would survive, but he’d never be able to pilot a jaeger again. But all of that will be tomorrow, this was where it began. 

But no, that isn't right. It started here: 

The first kaiju came out of the deep when Jamie was just a little boy. Too young to remember what life had been like without the knowledge that monsters are real, but they aren't under your bed, they're in the middle of the damn ocean. 

If this story was really about Jamie, it might start there. An idyllic childhood, growing up safe on an island just off the mainland. The journey he’d taken from two parents, two siblings, a dog and a house to just him, sitting alone in his room in his concrete reinforced bunker. It had taken three years of kaiju attacks for them to wander far enough north to hit Victoria, but by that time humanity already abandoned the Pacific coast. San Francisco had been a lesson to everyone. 

Or it might start with the rim, buried beneath the ocean, and the sudden knowledge that man’s search for life on other planets had been focused in the wrong direction. But that isn't right. Or it would be, maybe. If this were a story about the kaiju, or about the huge robots built by humans to fight them. If this was a hero’s tale. 

But it isn’t that either. This might be where it starts: 

Jamie has gone one year and ten months without a partner when Tyler comes to the Shatterdome. One year and ten months of training to get himself ready again, one year and ten months of mandatory visits with a therapist to make sure he was ready to let someone else into his head, one year and ten months of watching as they slowly rebuilt the parts of Nova that had been torn off by the kaiju. 

The rumors from the dome in LA dogged Tyler all the way north to what was left of San Francisco. Stories about about wild parties, piloting hung over, conquests among the dome crew. 

And the worst one: his eventual replacement in the rig by someone “better suited.” 

Tyler will assume, because Jamie doesn’t disabuse him of this notion, that these rumors are why Jamie resists the match for so long. It seemed easier to Jamie, at the time, than explaining that he worried he’d been irreparably broken that day almost two years ago, in ways less visible than Jordie’s injuries. In ways that might prove fatal to a new partner. 

Eventually, through stilted and then more comfortable conversations, through drifting in the practice rig and then in Nova, Jamie will find out that Tyler was only hungover the one time, and that the experience was horrible enough he’ll never repeat it. He’ll find out that it is possible to make a party out of someone’s abandoned ipod, two speakers, and the aged bottles of flavored vodka they’d “liberated” from an abandoned liquor store, and that those parties may have happened more than once, but they were fighting bad sci fi monsters for fuck’s sake, surely a stress relieving party every now and then was fine.

He’ll find out, both because Tyler is painfully open in ways Jamie has never been able to be, and because there are no secrets in the drift, that the thing about the conquests is both true and not true, that Tyler falls in love often, that the intensity of his focus is too much for some, and that unfortunately includes his old partner.

They won’t talk about that much, but they won’t have to. 

For a long time, they will not talk about what Jamie sees in the drift: his own hands, cupped around a coffee mug; his head tilted back, lips open on a laugh; the breadth of his shoulders blocking the light down the tunnel to the rig. Jamie will not ask why Tyler is cataloging these moments, and Tyler won’t tell him. 

One day though, he will, and that is where the story truly starts.

**Author's Note:**

> Still more coming, friends. 
> 
> Thanks to C for the beta.


End file.
